susan vivanathan's book The Christians of Kerala (OUP) is interesting. it is not from a church/hagiographic position and located within the context of contemporary critical historical scholarship. and interestingly she never tries to erase herself from her subject of study, and her own negotiation with her syrian catholic background forms a secondary text, even though not at a conspicious level.
though not strictly about Kerala Christians, the scholarship around the Indian Ocean trade will give one an idea around the complex social matrix which produced the syncretic cultures witnessed in Kerala. for a more accesible account of that you can try, Amitav Ghose's In an Antique Land. In fact, one of the characters in that book (Antique Land falls between multiple genres: novel, travellogue, history writing, memoir) is called Ben Yiju [1]. In fact early on in this name discussion thread, i was reminded of that character. The real master of Indian Ocean history is of course, Ashin Das Gupta. OUP has an omnibus edition of two of his best works. India and the Indian Ocean World : Trade and Politics (OUP) [1] I think it is Ben Yiju. dont have the book with me right now. Nishant, is it correct? On 1/6/07, Biju Chacko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 05/01/07, Thaths <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 1/4/07, Biju Chacko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > That's true. However the nit-picker with me insists on pointing out > > that I am Syrian Orthodox. Catholics broke away from us relatively > > recently and believe Protestantism is some kind of internal wrangling > > amongst those heretics. ;-) > > Relatively recently? It was almost a 1000 years ago[1], wasn't it? Well yes, but it wouldn't have been as funny if I had said that. > BTW, can you recommend a good book on the secular history of different > Christianities in Kerala over the centuries? I can't actually. I'm told some of the best books are in Malayalam, but since I'm illiterate in that langauage I haven't read them. Most of the English books are published by one church or the other and are slanted in one way or the other. Wikipedia isn't bad, but some of the articles tend to have NPOV issues. These are a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Thomas_Christians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Malabar_Nasrani This has some info about the particular denomination that I belong to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar_Thoma_Church -- b
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